With Google Maps and Bing Maps Streetside you can navigate between immersive 360-degree panoramas to visualize your route.  Although this street-view integration is very helpful in visualizing your route before you drive it, there are problems with it and the brainiacs at Microsoft Reseach think they have the solution.  They describe the problem like this: “The discrete moves from bubble [360-degree panorama] to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block.  Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.”  In other words they can be quite disorienting.  Their solution, called Street Side, allows you to seamlessly zoom out of the bubble to view a multi-perspective panorama view of a street.  In this zoomed out view you can pan across an entire street to find exactly what you’re looking for or to plan your route in a more effective way.  Once you find a particular destination or a location you’d like to investigate further simply zoom in to view a part of a street on more detail.  The mapping tech is extremely impressive; check it out for yourself in the demonstration above.  The developers are currently making an iPhone (and presumably a Windows Phone 7) version of the maps to bring to mobile devices.  Don’t get too excited, though; only about 2400 panoramas of 4 kilometers of streets has been covered thus far.

[Via Engadget; Microsoft]